[Glade-users] Upgrade experience... Slooowww strings and other worries

[tristan.van.berkom at gmail.com (Tristan Van Berkom)]

On Mon, Jan 31, 2011 at 7:05 AM, John Coppens <john at jcoppens.com> wrote:
> Hello all.
>
> I finally gathered the courage to port the program I wrote for my wife's
> pharmacy to Glade 3. There are _loads_ of windows, many of which I'm
> replacing with dialogs to simplify the GUI.
>
> Anyway, I estimate I'm at about 70-80% of redefining the windows, and
> any string editing (say, widget names, or label/other texts) is taking
> from 10 to 25 seconds to see the change. The rest of the Glade process
> seems to suffer little.

I very recently addressed the sluggishness of editing strings in the UI.

Glade master and glade-3-8 branch should be more usable for you.

> So, I want to pose a few questions:
>
> 1) At the moment, I'm putting _all_ widgets in the same .ui file. Is
> this causing the long delays? And...

Yes, I'm not entirely sure why but it seemed that only large projects
were effected by the said slugishness in editing strings.

> 2) Will this cause similar delays when the actual program is running?
> I'm far from trying this out.

No there is no relation.

> 3) Is there a better/more efficient way to manage 30-odd windows in a
> program? I've read a few contradictory opinions on the 'net, and I
> don't particularly ?wouldn't want to carry 30 .ui files around.

It's really up to your own personal opinion right now.

However in the future I'm planning on an approach that
is more like NextStep, Gtk+ widget classes should be
definable as composite widget classes deriving from
some GtkContainer and have the contents defined and
extended using a GtkBuilder file.

My personal opinion here is that your code is more reusable
and modular if one .ui goes with one component of your
UI and can be reused at will.

Note there is no reason why you would have to ever
put those files on disk, you can always generate header
files with const gchar *ui_string = "<interface>..." from
the glade file with a little scripting and then using
gtk_builder_add_from_string().

> 4) On a slightly other topic, when defining Buttons with extra
> graphics, the images seem to appear on the widget tree as unrelated
> items. Is that normal?

Yes, the "image widget" of a GtkButton is a toplevel object
in the Glade file which is referred to by the button via the "image-widget"
property.

Some widgets work differently in this respect, also if you define
custom button contents you will have a placeholder and anything
you add there will be a child of the button.

> 5) If I use a stock graphic (icon) for a ImageButton, the image
> appears, but disappears on copy and paste (even though the image name
> is still correctly defined).

That is a bug, please feel free to report them in the 'glade' product
at bugzilla.gnome.org :)

> 6) Still farther away from the original issue - is there a DateEdit
> widget which can replace the (apparently) deprecated GnomeDateEdit?

I'm not sure.. does GtkCalander help at all here ?

Cheers,
           -Tristan